Packaged food products such as dairy products, fruit juices, eggs, bread, etc. are commonly transported and stored in specialized crates. The crates have orifices in their sides to allow the crates to be grasped by users and weight bearing flanges on the crate bottoms to allow the crates to be stacked. An example of such a crate is a milk crate. The crates are very useful because they provide protection to the packages and are designed to be stacked to conserve space when storing or shipping the packaged food products.
Empty crates used to transport and store packaged food products are not heavy. However, even a single crate when full of packaged food products can be quite heavy. For example, a milk crate containing sixteen quarts of milk can weigh about thirty pounds. Since crates are usually stacked when stored and transported, it follows that a stack of five milk crates could weigh about 150 pounds. It is also common to stack crates in moving trucks, storage warehouses, coolers, etc. which have floors with surfaces made of non-skid materials such as diamond plate steel, roughly finished concrete, wooden pallets, etc. People who must ship and store packaged food products, therefore, are faced with the problem of moving heavy stacks of crates over rough floor surfaces. The most common way to move these stacks is by using a long metal tool with a hook at a lower end which is inserted into a hand orifice on the crate at the bottom of a stack. The upper end of the metal tool has a spade type grip which is held by the stack mover. The tool is used to drag the crate stack across the floor to move the stack. Thus, due to the weight of the stacked crates full of food products and the rough floor surfaces, moving stacked crates is hard work. Therefore, a need exists for a device which would reduce the amount of effort required for a person to move a stack of packaged food crates over a rough surface such as diamond plate steel, wooden pallets or rough concrete.
Thus, the object of this invention is to provide a device which will allow a person to easily move a stack of crates containing packaged food products over surfaces such as diamond plate steel, wooden pallets, or rough concrete.